#5: Listening for ‘personality’

Section 1: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a

We were keen that some of the more colloquial content of our process should not be overly diluted in the retrospective account, especially in cases where such thinking was key to our understanding. For instance, listening for the people ‘behind’ the notes offered a useful heuristic through which to get a more intimate sense of the Czech Quartet’s internal dynamics. Although these are never concrete (or falsifiable) claims, such sensitivities are a self-evidently important dimension of ensemble interaction. And from our point of view as player-detectives, this impression of lifelike qualities was so vivid that we often ceased to witness a meaningful separation between musician and music. Listening for personalities behind also helped us to recognise that interpersonal interaction is nothing like an expressive ‘device’: it always resists concrete formalisation, yet is ‘directly’ intelligible.